An updated version of the US Constitution was unveiled last
week, a good summary
is here.

I have only noticed the commentary on a few political web
sites about the impact of the new legislation, I was expecting
everyone to be up in arms about it.

The New York Times article Editorial has a good summary of
the problems:

Here’s what happens when this irresponsible
Congress railroads a profoundly important bill to serve the
mindless politics of a midterm election: The Bush
administration uses Republicans’ fear of losing their majority
to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will
make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our
217-year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to
protect the nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their
principles to avoid last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is
the big loser.

Republicans say Congress must act right now to create
procedures for charging and trying terrorists — because the
men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks are available for
trial. That’s pure propaganda. Those men could have been tried
and convicted long ago, but President Bush chose not to. He
held them in illegal detention, had them questioned in ways
that will make real trials very hard, and invented a
transparently illegal system of kangaroo courts to convict
them.

It was only after the Supreme Court issued the inevitable
ruling striking down Mr. Bush’s shadow penal system that he
adopted his tone of urgency. It serves a cynical goal:
Republican strategists think they can win this fall, not by
passing a good law but by forcing Democrats to vote against a
bad one so they could be made to look soft on terrorism.

Last week, the White House and three Republican senators
announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave
Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver
for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his
antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and
his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that
it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he
wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to
unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize
what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to
hundreds of men captured in error.

These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of
“illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal
residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens
living in their own countries, to summary arrest and
indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president
could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a
half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush
to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he
considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret —
there’s no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would
lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These
cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They
simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their
innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review
any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military
tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions
based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All
Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to
declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if
a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in
terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that
exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee
Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit
evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant,
whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass
murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to
weaken protections against such evidence.

Offenses:The definition of torture is unacceptably
narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the
administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault
are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or
coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual
sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as
torture.

There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially
since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have
been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the
Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a
moment for a filibuster, this was it.

We don’t blame the Democrats for being frightened. The
Republicans have made it clear that they’ll use any
opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a
terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won’t remember
the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration.

They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law
that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy,
our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

And of course, the problem is that these new provision are
easily misused and abused: like the DMCA is misused and
abused; like the war-on-drugs legislation is misused and
abused and like the Patriot Act is misused and abused.